A Place on Earth (Port William) (23 page)

"Well, you know that old lane used to go on out the ridge and down
the branch, and struck the creek road there opposite Gideon Crop's
house. But I don't reckon anybody's used it beyond my gate for twentyfive or thirty years. And that's where the car had gone. It had a sort of
running start by the time it hit the unused part of the road, and it went
down the slope of the ridge, spinning and slipping, riding down the
weeds and bushes as it went, and then picked up speed where the road
turned down into the first hollow, and went over the bank and wedged
itself finally into a kind of jungle of undergrowth and grapevines and
briars at the bottom of the slant. By the time we'd tracked it into that
hollow, we could hear the engine running again just the way we had
before. But even after that it took us a while to find it, buried in all that
brush, and us with no better lights than we had. We finally caught the
shine of one of the taillights and sort of dug our way in to it. And there they were.

"Only this time they were both still in the car. They were just sitting
there, looking straight ahead, sort of hopeless and forlorn. And the old
man was pouring the gas to it again, like it was that or else. Where the
difference was, was with her. Instead of being sort of outside the situation, and mad about it, this time she seemed to be in it as deep as he was,
just as puzzled and beat.

"We had to holler and whoop and beat on the roof for it seemed like
five minutes before we could get them to see us and unlock the doors
and let us help them get out. Which took some doing, the car was so
wedged in among the bushes and vines, and at that we couldn't open but
one door. We got them out and got the engine shut off, and then opened
the hood to see if we could stop the horn.

"It was like the old man hadn't heard the horn, or paid any attention
to it, until we did that. All of a sudden it just made him nervous all over.
He hadn't listened to it a second before he'd had every bit of it he could
take. And he reached in where the motor is and began pulling the wires
loose. You never saw anything like it. A man as big and stout as he is, all
of a sudden tormented and mad as he could be, pulling that wiring up
with his hands like it was grass, and the sparks and blue fire shooting all
over the place, and the horn blowing right on like it was coming down
out of the sky. There wasn't a thing for Jarrat and me to do but hold the
lanterns up and stand back. Well, he tore out every wire he could lay his
hands to, and some of the other pieces besides, and the horn still kept
on. And then he caught hold of one of the battery cables and picked the
battery up and went to shaking it like a dog would shake a rat-the blue
sparks still flashing and snapping-and finally jerked the fastening loose.
That stopped the horn, and stopped him too. He quieted right down,
then, and just stood there. And so did the rest of us, while the songbirds
and mosquitoes and things flew out of our ears and off into the woods.
It was so quiet you could hear yourself breathe.

"`Well, Mr. Greatlow,' I said, `this may not be where you was going,
but you've done got here.'

"`Hank?' he said.

`And then he looked back at what the lantern showed of the sort of
tunnel he'd bored coming down. `The God-damned government,' he said. `Build a thing like this, this day and time, and call it a road.'

`And for a while after that we just kept on standing there in the quiet,
like maybe if we waited around it would finally begin making sense to
somebody. And it was a right remarkable scene-all of us standing there,
listening to the racket flying away, everybody standing sort of alone, all
about the same distance apart, all facing the automobile but not looking
exactly at it-like it was one of them things you ain't supposed to admit
you know as long as there's a lady present. And the old woman was standing just where we'd helped her to, her mouth all puckered out like
Whistler's mother. And I said to myself, `She's going to kill him or she's
going to cry.' Well sir, directly she began to cry.

`About the time she started that, and maybe because of it, it hit me
what a comical scene it was, and I began to get tickled. And at the same
time I knew that that old woman standing off there by herself, crying,
was about the saddest thing ever I seen. She wasn't asking for any comfort because she never had and didn't know how, and probably suspicioned that she might not deserve any. And her old husband so hard rode
that he couldn't have gone to her even if he'd wanted to.

"I went to her then, and consoled her the best I could told her we'd
get them home all right, and everything would be fine, and so on. And
then I says, `Ma'am, how in the world come you all to be trying this road?
Mistook your directions, I reckon.'

"But that wasn't what they'd done. She calmed down before long and
told me.

`After we got them unstuck in the afternoon, they went on back to
Hargrave by the way we told them to go, and got there about dark. They
stopped at the little store this side of the bridge to get some groceries,
and the storekeeper tells them, first thing, that Gideon Crop had been in
there about the middle of the afternoon. Said he had about a week's
growth of beard and looked like he'd been dug up out of the mud. And
acted to the storekeeper like he never saw him before. Just bought some
cheese and crackers, and cashed a check for four dollars, and carried his
eats out in a paper sack.

"Well, the old woman said she knew then that something wasn't
right. That's the way she kept putting it: `There's something ain't right.
Lord, I know it.' So she didn't do a thing but get back in the car and make the old man turn around and head back up here. They went to Roger
Merchant's first. But Mr. Merchant, he"-and here Burley hesitates, and
looks at Margaret-"wasn't in no shape to receive company."

"Drunk," Mat says.

Burley nods. "So when the Greatlows knocked and hollered at the
back door, nobody came. The light was on inside and they could hear
Roger talking-to himself, I reckon-but they couldn't raise him. They
gave up there finally, and went on over the hill as far as they could go in
the car, and then tried to get over to the Crops' house on foot. Of course
there wasn't any chance of that. They had nearly a mile to go in the mud
and the creek to cross, and it still running deep, and they never even had
a light. They sort of felt their way along for a while, and finally admitted
it was hopeless, and turned back. And then they see that they ought to
have left the car lights on because it took them a good while, creeping
along the way they had to in the dark, to find the car. They got to it,
finally, and got it turned around and started back up the hill-and were
just ready to give up and go home again when the old woman remembered the road that used to go down from our place. She figured that if
they could get to the foot of the hill there she would at least be in calling
distance of the house. So she decided to try it. She hadn't been down that
road since she was young, but she thought that in all that time it surely
was bound to have got better, not worse."

"Burley," Margaret says, "we're fixing breakfast for you. You'll eat
with us, won't you?"

"Why, yes ma'am, Mrs. Feltner. Now that you've asked me, I reckon I
will."

"Go on," Mat says.

"So, anyhow, we decided that Jarrat would take the old people home
in the truck, and we'd let them know how Ida was as soon as we could
find out. Jarrat started off ahead to get the truck, and I stayed back with
the Greatlows, sort of helping the old woman up the climb. Jarrat had
the truck waiting at my gate when we got there, and I helped them in.

"I'd already promised myself to go right on down to the Crops'. I
hadn't said so, but seemed to me I had to agree with the old womansomething ain't right down there.

"Well, the more I thought about it, the more sure I got that they're in some kind of trouble, and the more I sort of hung back from the thought
of walking into it by myself, to tell you the truth. And then I thought of
you, Mat, and decided I'd ask you. I know it's Sunday and all, but would
you mind?"

At the bottom of the hill, just above the high-water line, Mat pulls the
truck to the side of the road, and they get out. Before them in the sediment of the flood is the scrawl of the Greatlows' first catastrophe and
rescue. Where it is broken by the clutter of tracks, the mud has begun to
dry.

To avoid the mud as long as possible, they walk along the face of the
hill just above what was the shoreline a few days ago. At their feet, the
spring has made its small beginnings: narrow grassblades spiking out of
their dead sheaths, spring beauties, a few white flowers of bloodroot.
The sunlight again becomes a dwelling place. The life of the ground has
begun its rise. And Mat walks, thinking, a kind of singing and crying
pressing in his throat: "Yes. It has come again."

They walk as quietly as hunters over the soft ground along the slope
as it turns from the river valley into the valley of the creek. The sun is
well up now, the warmth of it pressing their heads and shoulders. On the
hillside around them there is still that stain of green. In town Uncle Stanley Gibbs is ringing the church bell.

The brush thickens on the slope ahead of them, and to avoid it they
turn down the hillside to the creek road. Their feet now weighted with
mud, they go more slowly, laboring to walk. Before they have gone many
steps, they come to the tracks of a man going out. The tracks turn out of
the road just ahead of them, go up the bank, and disappear among the
bushes on the hillside.

"They must be Gideon's," Burley says. "He went out the same way
we've come in."

`And he hasn't come back. At least not by the same way."

They are coming toward the upper end of the woods in the bottom,
the road going along the edge of the valley floor. They seem to have come, not back into the winter, but beyond any season. Around them
everything has been flowed over, coated with mud. A few days ago the
water stood higher than their heads where they are walking now, and
they do not forget it.

They come out of the woods and Burley stops suddenly and points to
the careening barn.

But the barn isn't all. Fences have been pushed over and weighted with
drift. A great fan of rocks and gravel has been thrown out onto the cropland. Along the banks of the creek are several notches where big trees
were torn out by the roots.

"Lord, she was rolling when she hit here."

`Awful," Burley says. `Awful. Look at them fences. Look at them
rocks. It'll never be what it was."

The road crosses a rise of the ground, and from the top they can see
the long curve of tracks swinging up past the house to the ford of the
creek and back down to the road. Deep, brimming with shadow, they are
the only marks.

"They're Gideon's all right," Burley says.

"He couldn't come out by the bridge," Mat says. "It's gone. Look yonder." He points to where the bridge hangs snarled in the tree branches.

`And we can't get in by it, either, come to think of it. We can cross at
the ford, I reckon, the way he did."

They leave the road, walking beside the old tracks, around the openings of which a dry crust has begun to form. The going becomes harder
now They sink to their ankles at each step, and then, as they heave the
other foot out of the mud, sink deeper. Every step requires a combination of main strength and delicate balance.

But they don't stop again until they come to the ford. There where the
high banks have been tapered back to let the road across, they stand a
moment looking at the water still running strong, and then they look at
each other and laugh.

"Nosir," Burley says, "we ain't going to wade that in boots."

Each dreads it more than he wants to admit, and they stand there
another minute, a little fidgety, looking up and down the creek, wishing
for a bridge. And then they pull off their boots and socks and britches, and wade the thigh-deep icy stream.

When they knock at the back door, nobody answers. They knock and
wait, and knock and wait.

They have just turned to start off the porch when Ida comes around
the corner of the house, carrying a load of stovewood and an axe.

She says, "Hello, Mr. Feltner. Hello, Mr. Coulter. How're you all?"
And steps up onto the porch, leaning the axe against one of the posts.

"Fine, thank you," Burley says. "Better weather, ain't it?"

Mat says, "We thought we'd stop by to see how you made it through
the flood. Gideon ain't here, is he?"

"No sir, he ain't." And, when they seem to wait for her to say something more: "He went off. I ain't expecting him before supper."

"Well," Burley says, "that old creek surely did come out romping and
stomping."

"Yes," she says, nodding, "it did."

Mat says, "I usually see Annie before I see you, Ida. Where's she?"

She hesitates, seems to brace herself between the porch floor and the
load of wood; her eyes brim with tears. But her voice, when it comes, is
steady and quiet:

"It drownded her. You seen the bridge. Well, she was on it when it
tore out."

For a few seconds they stand, all three of them, as if startled by a sudden loud sound in the distance. And then Ida turns and looks directly at
them and smiles, her eyes still blurred by the unfallen tears.

"Lord," she says, "I'm letting you stand out here like I haven't got any
manners at all. Come in and sit down. I know you're tired. I know you
must have had to walk nearly the whole way. And through that mud."

She opens the door and goes ahead of them into the kitchen. As she
builds the fire, she begins her story: "I was sewing. In that rocking chair
right there by you, Mr. Feltner. And all of a sudden the radio up and quit."
And before long she interrupts herself- "I know you all would like some
coffee." And without waiting to let them answer, she fills the coffee pot
and sets it on the stove. And then she resumes, interrupting again, when
the coffee is made, to fill their cups. She does not sit down with them,
but stands, facing them, sideways to the stove, her right hand now and
then, absently, reaching for the handle of the coffee pot, which she takes up twice again to refill first Burley's cup and then Mat's. She never once
falters in her telling. Nor by her tone does she seem to expect help or
consolation, as though she simply takes for granted that the time has
long gone when she could have been either helped or consoled.